So it’s official. A week after Reuters first broke the story, the Wall Street Journal today confirmed (paywall) that the European Union’s regulators are preparing an antitrust investigation into Google’s Android mobile platform. Investigators are sending out questionnaires, seen by both Reuters and the Journal, asking:
It seems like barely a month passes without some mega-merger or eye-popping acquisition in the technology industry. Cue breathless analysis about a new tech bubble. But is the industry really that overheated? Mergermarket, a research group that tracks mergers and acquisitions, shared its data (available here as a pdf) with Quartz.
The argument that every company is a tech company—or that there is no such thing as a tech company—is an old one. But it seems increasingly clear that every company also needs to be a data company.
Annexing territory is the easy bit. It’s the hard slog of bringing it into the fold that takes more patience, money, and time. Four months after Crimea officially became a part of Russia, and three months after Russia’s Rostelecom finished laying a 46 km (27 mile) submarine cable along the Kerch Strait that separates the peninsula from the Russian mainland, Crimean internet service providers (ISPs) have started finally started sending traffic through Russia, according to Renesys, a company that monitors the world’s networks.
In September 2012, Quartz published a prescient piece titled “Facebook’s plan to find its next billion users: convince them the internet and Facebook are the same.” The article argued that Facebook Zero, a way to access the social network without paying for data, would give Facebook “the chance to become the world’s homepage.”
When you install an app on an Android smartphone or tablet, it asks for access to data such as your location or address book. If you say no, you can’t install the app. Not surprisingly, this puts some people off:
Less than 24 hours after India’s largest e-commerce company, Flipkart, raised $1 billion in a spectacular funding round on par with Facebook, Amazon countered with a little announcement of its own. It declared that it will invest an additional $2 billion “to support its rapid growth and continue to enhance the customer and seller experience in India.”
Flipkart, an Indian e-commerce company started by a pair of Amazon alumni, just confirmed that it raised $1 billion in funding. That’s more than the $780 million the company raised in the first seven years of its existence, and values the firm at between $6 billion and $7 billion, reports Mint, an Indian business newspaper.
Carmakers from Detroit to Seoul are talking up their efforts to build “connected cars”—cars with in-built mobile connectivity. But their product managers are left to worry about how they’re actually going to make any money from these smartphones on wheels.
First the good news: Google is paying more tax in Ireland, up an impressive 63% to €27.7 million ($37.25 million) in 2013. Here’s the even better news (for Google, that is): that’s just 0.16% of the €17 billion in revenue Google raked in from its various European operations last year. And most of these operations are billed from Ireland.
“In the olden days,” says Ben Holmes, a partner at Index Ventures, “you’d raise money and you’d build an interesting stack of technology that was hard to replicate. Your competitive advantage was technologically originated.”
Almost everyone on earth has a mobile phone, if you believe the mobile industry’s data on active mobile connections. Just take a look at the numbers for “mobile penetration” from GSM Association (GSMA), a trade group for mobile operators:
Flipkart, the Indian e-commerce company founded in 2007 by two Amazon alumni, will announce that it has raised $1 billion in fresh funding, reports The Economic Times, an Indian business newspaper, citing “two people aware of the development.”
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is one of the few institutions Indians respect (paywall). India’s central bank is known for being clean, sensible, and well-run. It is also extremely cautious. That is one reason India has remained a laggard in the mobile money revolution sweeping the poor world.
It is not uncommon for smartphone users to have WhatsApp, WeChat, Viber, Facebook Messenger, and other competitors all installed on their phones, using different apps to talk to different groups of friends and choosing from a rich and diverse ecosystem to best fit their needs and social circles.
Feature phones—those things without touchscreens or internet connections known colloquially as dumbphones—aren’t dead yet. But if Google and Microsoft get their way, they are are not long for this world. Smartphones outsold feature phones for the first time in 2013.
Every major automobile manufacturer is making some sort of connected car—vehicles embedded with internet connections to provide richer navigation, diagnostics, and entertainment options. But internet connections in cars—just like the ones in homes and on phones—can be costly. And carmakers have no idea how the economics will work.
There are 7.18 billion human beings on the planet today. And there are 7.07 billion mobile phone connections. But those belong to fewer than 3.6 billion unique subscribers, or just over half the earth’s population. Some of that other half of humanity without mobile phones are children, the elderly, or neo-luddites. But many more are simply too poor to afford a phone. For the 2.4 billion people who live on less than $2 a day, even the cheapest, most basic mobile phone is half a month’s wages.
The Wall Street Journal’s tech columnist (and until recently my colleague here at Quartz), Christopher Mims, yesterday handed out his Twitter password (paywall) to the Journal’s millions of readers. ”Knowing that won’t help you hack it,” Mims wrote, since he uses two-factor authentication, an added layer of security offered by the big web firms. With two-factor authentication, Twitter sends a code to your mobile phone, which you need to enter on the site in addition to your password.
What if the world’s biggest online advertising company could figure out a way to go beyond showing ads? What if it could actually get people to go into stores?
Every country in the world looks enviously toward Silicon Valley. And every country tries to have its own—whether it’s a silicon alley, wadi, shire, beach, hill, or swamp. Yet the hub of technology businesses on the West Coast of the United States remains outsize by any standard.
Back in 2009, few engineers wanted to work for LinkedIn. It was a relative minnow as big Silicon Valley firms go, and not a particularly sexy one either. Compared to the glamorous lifestyle on offer at Google (free food! 20% time!) or Facebook (moving fast! breaking things!), LinkedIn seemed staid. “We couldn’t pay as much and didn’t have a brand,” says Steve Cadigan, who led LinkedIn’s human resources department from 2009 to the end of 2012.
As much as powertrains, drivetrains, and garish jackets, sound is a crucial component of motor sports. In fact, fans of Formula 1, the world’s richest and most popular motor sport, have complained that the cars in this year’s season are too quiet (video).
Indian mobile operators, in their attempts to get their low-paying consumers to use more high-margin data, have over the past year been breaking up the web into chunks to sell piece-by-piece to their consumers. So a wireless user might pay a fee to access YouTube or other video services, or have a special price just to use Facebook or Whatsapp.
